Photo courtesy Mike Engle

By Matthew Stolle | Post-Bulletin | June 26, 2009

Gordon Tindall has a peculiar habit. He can't help laughing whenever he considers the strange, crazy, sometimes humorous situations his love of old diners has gotten him in.

When Tindall first came upon a 1927 diner in Gilbertsville, N.Y., it was a wreck. It had no windows, no doors, no interior. The walls were bulging out. The whole structure was a sagging mess.

Tindall, who has operated two other diners, couldn't wait until he could begin rebuilding it.

"I guess that's my downfall," Tindall said, taking a break from his top-to-bottom reconstruction of the diner, now located in downtown Lanesboro. "I like fixing something I think still deserves a second chance. And this diner to me, well, there was no other one like it."

Nearly six months into his restoration efforts, Tindall figures he is 75 percent finished with the restaurant he plans on calling "Spud Boy," and hopes to have it open for business next spring.

"Oh, it's beautiful," said Tindall. "Each one I say is my greatest achievement. This one far outshines the others."

Love at first sight

Tindall, 62, loves talking about diners, loves everything about them. It got into his blood and never left, even in years when the dining business wasn't so good to Tindall.

The first diner he ever restored was a metal diner built in 1940. He spent four years restoring it. Two weeks before the scheduled grand opening, a drunken driver ran into it, heavily damaging the exterior.

The restaurant in Decorah, Iowa, never took, so he eventually sold it. For nearly four years, Tindall ran a diner called the Red Rose Diner in Towanda, Penn., that he rebuilt and reconstructed, before selling it to focus on his latest creation.

Tindall says it was love at first sight with his current project. What made it so unique was that this one had wheels. An archeologist who had discovered the bone of some previously undiscovered prehistoric animal couldn't have been more excited than Tindall was with his discovery.

It was the only wheeled diner left. And even though the structure was in "terrible shape" and had never been built that well in the first place, Tindall recognized its possibilities.

"I'll tell you, I'm the luckiest guy in the world to be able to do this," Tindall said.

It's in the name

Once you get to know a little bit about Tindall, you begin to understand why he thinks he's so lucky. Raised on a New Jersey potato farm, Tindall learned to take apart and reassemble almost anything, a skill he picked up from his dad. From his mother, an artist, came his creative side and his feel for color.

Indeed, one of the diner's distinctive features the picture of a boy wearing a hat on the diner's front was taken from a painting his mom did of him when he was a boy. Tindall's nickname as a boy was Spud Boy, hence the restaurant's name.

Restoring diners engages both sides of Tindall's nature. And his artistic side is on full display as he moves through the small intimate space of the diner, describing little touches he has made to the restaurant, from a Smoky the Bear no-smoking sign to some old benches he found at an antique shop,

"I'm kind of half and half. I like going to art galleries, and I like going to stock car races," he said.

Since moving the wheeled diner onto a small downtown lot in Lanesboro late last year, "Spud Boy" invariably draws stares and visitors. It slows his work down a little, but Tindall says he doesn't mind.

"I welcome it. I like people coming by and showing an interest," he said.

You would be hard pressed to find another person as engaged as Tindall is restoring an old restaurant. But Tindall says it's not the most challenging project he has undertaken. That distinction would reserved for the house he and his wife are fixing up.

"If you could see that house, this diner is nothing compared to the headache this house is," he said. "But it was the only house we could afford."

Originally published online here: http://news.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=31&a=405590